Vow
by David Whyte
I want you
to see
yourself
the way
I sometimes
see you.
I want you
to see
yourself
with the
self-same
eyes
that have me
shy
of telling you
what I see.
I want you
come across
your self
and see
yourself,
the way I did
that first
morning,
as a beautiful
incredibly
kind
and inviting
stranger.
I want you
to knock
gently on
your
own door
and stand there
astonished
as I do
unable
to speak
to the one
who has come
out to meet you.
Like Rilke’s
visiting
angel
of the
Annunciation
who forgot
his message
to Mary,
and could only
fall back
to singing
her praises,
stuttering and
overwhelmed
as he was,
by the untroubled
beauty
of her soul.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to post this when I first came across it looking for another poem, and then I decided it felt important, as earnest a wish for someone else as is possible to write for someone as an act of love. Despite the divorce, I’m grateful for the many gifts of poetry and insight in the marriage, and this perhaps most of all. These lines were written specifically for our marriage in 2017, and it is mine. (Which, by the way, about two weeks before the wedding, David announced that not only were we to write our own vows, he had written three original poems for his, which I thought was just a mite unfair at the time, and funny in retrospect!).
The angel reference is from Rilke's The Annunciation to Mary in the Marien-Leben (Life of Mary, 1912), one of the lesser-known works in his corpus. In Rilke's version, the angel arrives with the message that Mary is to bear the Christ-child, but is so overwhelmed by the beauty of her soul that he forgets the message and can only stutter praise. The angel becomes the seer rather than the messenger.
